The first step in recovery, whether from grief or any addiction, is to realize your heart is your power source to help you stop this self-abuse. Many recovery programs re-quire you to admit that you are powerless and to submit to the authority of another. God would like us to use our
“heart intelligence” and discover ourselves. Recovery is only half of the healing process. Acknowledging that you are powerless, unmanageable and addicted is a first step.
But don’t stop there, keep growing. With a deep willing-ness to surrender, you can let go, listen to your “still, small voice,” and allow your unhappy life to change.
Uncovering Compassion
Self-pity can be replaced with compassion for your-self and others. It is compassion, rather than your-self-pity, which makes the greatest contribution to true growth in recovery. While some can acknowledge that “others have suffered more than I,” not many people are able to sus-tain that feeling of truly “counting their blessings.”
Sooner or later most people find themselves on the “pity pot.” The 12 Steps program tells the newcomer not to worry; they only have to change one thing – everything!
Without inner heart management, this kind of effort and change in recovery is extraordinarily difficult. Very of-ten, the lack of inner balance leads to simply changing addictions, then coping with new addictive behaviors.
“Recovering, never recovered” is living in a state of fear that addictive behavior will again control your life.
Recovery is not complete until you move beyond fear and realize that we can and do recover. True and lasting recovery is achieved by developing security and under-standing within your own heart. Heart management allows you to transcend fear, transform addictive behav-ior and literally erase such patterns from your system.
Heart security enables you to move beyond “recovery”
into a new dimension of life experience—discovery.
All of us have some kind of grief to explore. Grief of incompletion. Grief of not having what we wish. Grief of shame. Grief of humiliation. Grief can be loss of control, death of friends or loved ones, even the loss of one’s pet.
We ask, “What did I do wrong?” “Why did this happen to me?” It is the feeling of separation from ourselves and
others to which the word “grief” can most accurately be applied. Real grief is the separation from your heart.
For example, when I was a teenager my best friend in the world was my horse, Shaquita. Every day I’d ride alone in the jungles and on the beach in Panama, where my father was stationed in the military. I loved her more than anything. When my father was transferred back to the States, I knew it was impractical to take Shaquita with me. I felt like I’d lost everything. There was an empty space inside. I couldn’t imagine how I could ever fall in love with anyone or anything as much as my horse. It was many years before I realized that it was my own heart opening that had felt so wonderful. That experi-ence, as painful as it was, gave me a depth of feeling that opened a new chapter in my life. My only true desire was to feel that love again. In my search for love, I came to deep understandings.
Falling in love is magnetic. Our hearts open and we become extremely receptive. We’re more flexible and life has new sparkle. Some people fall in love with God and it feels even stronger than falling in love with a person.
A mother falls in love with her child in a different way, but feels it just as deeply. All are aspects of the open heart, ready to receive. It’s the open heart that people yearn for to bring them fulfillment. In looking for love, we are look-ing for more of our own heart. When we lose the object of our love, the loss of that part of our heart can seem unbearable. When we try to go back to the heart and feel
Uncovering Compassion
The heart can feel like it hurts too much at times to want to put your energy there and feel what the heart feels. But it’s the pain of the heart shut off that hurts the most. You feel you’ve had to cut off a flow of love to a person or thing that is no longer there. Don’t get caught in a cycle of blaming and cutting off, blaming and cut-ting off. You’ll only prolong your pain. I discovered that there are plenty of people around to love, including my-self. Try feeling compassion for yourmy-self. Be gentle and kind inside as you reach for understanding. That will release the pain and let you feel your love again.
You’ll discover that real love is millions of miles past falling in love with anyone or anything. When you make that one effort to feel compassion instead of blame or self-blame, the heart opens again and continues open-ing. It’s only a mind-set (but a strong one) that says you need to have a certain something to feel that special feel-ing in your heart. Life will brfeel-ing that feelfeel-ing back to you, but you have to be open—it may come gift-wrapped in a different package than before. Your spirit wants more than anything for you to feel that total fulfillment, with-out dependency on someone or something for your security.
When you think another person is responsible for your happiness, then your lower heart bands of attach-ment are involved. Attachattach-ment keeps you bound to insecurity. It’s not that you didn’t love. You did. But it’s the mixture of love and attachment that’s confusing. You can tell you’re in lower heart bands by the way they drag
you around. The deeper heart builds inner security and that is what finally transforms the pain.
Whether you’re in a relationship—with a mate, a friend, a child—or are alone, you still have a relation-ship with every person you meet. You have a relationrelation-ship with your own heart, your spirit, yourself. If you con-sciously go to your heart with compassion, you will find heart intelligent answers to any relationship issue.
Victimhood reflects a collective sense of resignation in our society. It isn’t that suffering and loss shouldn’t be recognized. If we valued self-responsibility, we would treat victims with compassion and respect but not rever-ence. So often, friends sympathize and emotionally identify with each other’s problems, thinking they’re hav-ing a heart-to-heart talk. Sympathy is two people cryhav-ing in their beer, two pitiful people instead of one. This only amps up the emotions which feed the victimizing head thoughts. Then people take actions out of indignation, because of the principle of the matter and create more stress. Offer compassionate understanding, not sympa-thy, to friends in distress, then you can help them see from a new perspective. If you cry with them, you give your power to them and victimize yourself.